Book description
The poems in Ian Williams's Personals are jittery, plaintive, and decidedly fresh. They are almost-love poems, voiced through a startling variety of speakers who continually rev themselves up to the challenge of connecting with others, often to no avail. Williams pays beautiful homage to traditional poetic forms: ghazals, a pantoum,…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Personals as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Subverting common non-literary forms is a staple of Oulipian exploration, and here, as the title suggests, Ian Williams trains a laser-guided eye on the personal ad, that essentially bygone realm of yearning and melancholy and lust. The gimmick is quick to give way, but the author’s obsessive formal restlessness remains, and the resulting poems, with their twitches and swerves and pitch-perfect interruptions, are all the more devastating for it.
From Daniel's list on poetry from the outposts of potential literature.
If you love Personals...
The High House
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
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